Committee Members:

Qiushi Ren, PhD (Advisor, PKU-BME)

Shuming Nie, PhD (Co-advisor, PKU-BME)

Zhifei Dai, PhD (PKU-BME)

Changhui Li, PhD (PKU-BME)

Kun Yang, PhD (HBU)

Title:

Assessment of cancer therapeutics by multimodality imaging with novel molecular probes

Abstract:

Cancer, currently the second leading cause of death in the United States, is expected to become the first killer in the near future by surpassing heart diseases. Molecular imaging has become a key tool in the biomedical research and clinical imaging. Multimodality molecular imaging applying multi-probes traces multiple biological processes at the molecular level in living tissues with high resolution and specificity, distinguishing tumors from normal cells. F-18 ML-10 is one of the only two clinically available radiotracers for cancer apoptotic imaging. The concurrence of many apoptotic membrane imprint features marks the commitment point of a cell to the apoptotic death process, thus distinguishing such a cell from its viable or necrotic counterparts. However, there are many challenges for quantitative analysis of therapeutic assessment by using apoptotic imaging. As apoptosis is essentially a transient process, it is necessary to standardize the imaging method and time point, and to make quantitative analysis based on “volume-by-volume” of the image, in order to distinguish between cell apoptosis and spontaneous apoptosis. Hereby, we still need to continue collecting more clinical data of different types of brain tumor in order to analyze the image volume-by-volume in assessment of response of different types of tumors to radiotherapy. Furthermore, correlation between the result of this early assessment and subsequent anatomic change in tumor determined by MRI was also investigated for the further safety and effectiveness assessment. We also propose to assess the sensitivity and penetration depth of a novel SERS agents for hand-held spectroscopic device for in vivo and intraoperative tumor detection, and differentiate tumor from inflammation by a quad-modality molecular imaging in a mouse model.